Low hanging fruit

 "Where do you get your morals from?" This is a gotchya question Christians ask nonchristians frequently enough to be borderline comical. Street evangelists such as Ray Comfort and Frank Turek love to use this trope in an attempt to prove that without a moral law giver morals are subjective and ungrounded. 

The problem with this sort of questioning is that it is simply picking at low hanging fruit. Most people, including Christians, have never given the topic of ethics much thought. Even if you were to ask most Christians on the street as to where they get their morals from you will will, at best, receive one of two answers: the Bible or God. But these two answers (which are really only one answer: God), don't really answer the question. They simply put off the question one more step, just as the nonreligious would do if you gave them a chance.

When the nonreligious are ask this question, "I dunno" is typically the only answer Christians are expecting and, regardless of the actual answer, the only one they hear. At least, that is the only answer the ilk of Comfort are recording. But if given half the chance they will give more of an answer and many of them do. It may not be the answer they like and it may arguably not be a good answer, but it will be a better answer than "I dunno".  They may say, "My parents", or "The law", or "My heart", or "My brain", or any number of other answers. But here the Christian will no doubt argue that these answers are not good enough because they are subjective and arbitrary. But this is where my original point comes to the front. Christians are making a similar mistake when using divine command theory as their moral framework. Simply saying, "Because God" doesn't excuse them from explaining where they get their morals from. All they've done is put the question off into the distance a bit. Is there really a God? Where does God get his morals from? Why should we trust him? Which God are we talking about?, etc. Christians make a whole lot of assumptions when asking their questions.

The apologist will have answers for this, of course. However, we aren't talking about them, we are talking about apples to apples and therefore we must interview the man and woman on the street. I bet if we interview a dozen christians we will discover that few if any will have a good answer to this question. In fact, most will have the equivalent of, "I dunno". Something like, "Because he's God and God is moral".   

It is important that Christians, if they truly want to evangelize the masses, that they start having honest conversations with the people they are evangelizing. Stop with the gotchyas and start putting yourself in the other person's shoes. Be honest and stop with the trickery. It really doesn't set a good example for the person you are supposed to be representing.